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I saw Wilco live in Madrid a few days ago. I’d waited for this moment for many, many years. I arrived about four hours before the show. Walked around, had a few beers, and then took some time to observe the people that slowly filled the venue.  

A sea of 90s t-shirts revealed the target demographics and a promise of what could have been a super cool mixtape. Pixies, Nirvana, Massive Attack, Sonic Youth, Pearl Jam, and many more. 

Mr. Tweedy and his associates showed up precisely at 10pm as expected, said a few words in Spanish (“hola, muchas gracios”) and started playing. I couldn’t stop smiling for the next 2.5 hours.

Music is a transformative, immediate art that has a deep impact on people’s feelings. And live, it very naturally turns into a communal experience. You can hear it in the collective sigh triggered by those first unmistakable chords of a favorite song. There’s an unspoken bond. A cascade of shared feelings and a familiar complicity. 

In other words, loyalty.

If a band can trigger that, could a brand do it too?

(baby don’t hurt me)

Let’s set some basic definitions of what we’re talking about. According to Wikipedia, Brand Loyalty is a consumer's persistent positive feelings towards a familiar brand and their dedication to purchasing the brand's products and/or services repeatedly regardless of deficiencies, a competitor's actions, or changes in the market environment.

Persistence is also the key difference between loving and being in love. Loyal customers love too. Almost unconditionally. It’s earned and genuine. 

We can also discuss what we’re not talking about. The marketing industry suffers from a severe case of delusion and amnesia, so it’s good to reframe and remember some basic things. Loyalty is not about incentives, programs, points, gamification, or customer engagement tracking. Loyalty is a choice the customer makes, not the result of a performance tactic we, the market, refine.

Loyalty is not a campaign either. It’s both the relationship system, and the result of systematically - and very humanly -  cultivating emotions in our customers with honesty, consistency, and generosity.

Dennis Regan’s “Coca-Cola experiment” in 1971 is a classic study on reciprocity. Participants were paired with a research assistant (“Joe”). In half of the groups at the beginning of the interaction, Joe would bring the participant a Coke.  He’d then pretend to answer a phone call rudely and lose his temper. 

At the end, he asked them to buy raffle tickets to support this experiment.

Participants who received the soda were significantly more likely to buy a ticket. The act of generosity prevailed over the tantrum and the bad impression.

Good brands give. 

It’s not because we’re corny. It’s because we love dopamine. It’s the same principle behind those dark design patterns that make us doomscroll for hours on sinister social media apps. We’re chasing rewards. And we chemically love feeling good so we repeat that over and over. 

Plus, good feelings persist in our memories for much longer, leading to mental availability, which is key to transforming loyalty into actual sales.

Good brands make you smile, and make you remember.

This one's up for discussion, but I honestly believe this: 

Even in the era of fake everything, even if it takes us some time, even when we’re in denial, we still tend to spot the truth. We feel it, quoting Morpheus, as a splinter in our minds. At the very least, we awkwardly experience the uncanny valley of bullshit. We know when something doesn’t add up.

You can’t build an enduring and beloved brand selling snake oil.

Good brands are real and honest, have clear values, and reap the rewards.

The brilliant “The Four Dimensions of Loyalty, 2023)” from Ogilvy One includes an interesting blueprint to evaluate if a brand is capable of awakening those emotions in the target audience. 

It’s not about tactics. So what is it?

The framework establishes four “bonds” deeply integrated with four “dimensions” of loyalty.

The bonds are the mechanisms that brands use to build loyalty. They’re the how — the levers you pull to form a connection.

The dimensions are the forms that loyalty takes once the connection is established. They’re the why you stay, or more precisely, the type of loyalty you’ve developed.

In other words, you purchase because a bond is activated:

You stay because a dimension resonates:

This creates a sequence to achieve loyalty.

Bonds are activation levers; dimensions are identity anchors.

As you can see, this goes well beyond rotating discounts or creating a VIP segment. It’s a long-term game of storytelling, branding, intentional positioning, and walking the talk.

When we focus fervently on performance marketing we tend to miss structural, basic forces at play on our brand equity building and client satisfaction. This leads to losing money (or missing the opportunity to make money) in ways we cannot even calculate.

Like for instance:

Only 1 in 26 customers will tell a business about their negative experience; according to customer service facts, the rest simply leave. (Esteban Kolsky)

Just one bad experience would induce 44% of consumers to sever ties with a brand (Ogilvy)

Loyalty requires understanding what doesn’t work, and fixing it. Not doing so it’s a liability.

33% of consumers will abandon a brand that fails to create a sense of personalization (Accenture)

Customer Experience Index notes that brands which make customers feel appreciated will enjoy recommendations from 87% of consumers, higher spending from 80% of them, and repeat purchases from 76%.

It’s a multiplier. Chasing new clients is great. Just make sure you take good care of the ones you have, first and foremost.

87% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses in 2020. (Bright Local)

94% of American customers will recommend a company whose service they rate as “very good.” (Qualtrics XM Institute)

A loyal customer is an excellent sales person. A walking, truthful, persuasive ad.

13% of customers tell 15 or more people if they have a negative experience. (Esteban Kolsky)

67% of customers report a terrible customer experience as the reason for switching businesses. (Esteban Kolsky)

And it works both ways. Pissing off a customer is winning a very toxic ex that will show everyone that photo of you wearing nothing but a horse mask, taken after that party you barely remember, where you ran wasted around a swimming pool shouting in a language only you believe is Klingon. It’s hard to come back from that, I’ve been told.

Here’s a suggested blueprint to create a Loyalty strategy and action plan from scratch.

Have a hard look at you:

If we can agree that advertising lies is a poor, shortsighted strategy, but amplifying proven truths is a stronger game, then figure out your truths and radically stick to them.

We talked about this many times. User personas don’t work anymore. They’re simplified, biased assumptions of the customer we want to have, no matter how many quirks and unexpected turns we add to our fake profiles. Instead, we must delve deep into what reality tells you. Time for acronyms:

The RFM Model (Recency - Frequency - Monetary Value) is an objective, behavior based data analysis that helps you segment and categorize your customers based on their consumption patterns. It opens up the opportunity to recover those not fully engaged with the brand, and more importantly, to consistently reward and thank your ambassadors.

Customer Data Platforms have been growing steadily for the past fifteen years, but it’s only in the post-Covid-tech-catchup that they’ve been democratized (ugly, marketing jargon for saying they’re cheaper). Platforms like Klaviyo or Brevo now include it among their features, providing growing SMBs the tools to harness data power.

The beauty of a CDP, particularly on B2B, is that you could gather:

So you can leverage information from every source and see how patterns emerge. This helps you:

Talking to customers is always a fantastic way to understand their visible motivations. That’s why running focus groups, interviews, observing them (live or via anonymous tools like Clarity) is so important. 

That being said, most clients are unaware or incapable of understanding their own motivations. This is simply how the brain works. Most of our decisions are taken irrationally and emotionally on the amygdala (the so called Lizard brain) and then post-rationalized to sell a story to ourselves. 

In the words of Kahneman:

“System 1 runs the show. System 2 is the PR department.”

This disconnection creates a gap. So when you ask a client why they chose you, their answers might not paint the right picture. This is known as the “Say-Do Gap”.

Comparing your field research and customer reactions to the data gathered in RFM & CDP will give you more accurate information to make decisions.

(Yes, I know, it takes a shitload of time to do the work before the work. It is what it is. That’s also where agencies and consultants can act as shortcuts.)

Now that we have a reasonably accurate understanding of who we are, who we sell to, and why they buy, we can craft our strategy for loyalty.

Choose a leading bond from Ogilvy’s framework. It will anchor and define the other three. You need to develop them all, but one will be prevalent. Then create your copy, style and campaign around that bond. 

Examples from big brands:

Loyalty technology used to be extremely expensive, complex, and reserved to the few companies that could afford enterprise-level solutions. So companies were constrained to designing campaigns around old-school tactics. Coupons, stamp cards and so on.

Nowadays you can (and should) link the offline and online worlds in a unified, seamlessly integrated approach:

A solid stack gives the customer a perfect experience, and you have all the data you need to iterate and keep evolving the plan.

As you can see I’m not going to get into the dummy details that usually block this type of strategy. You know, things like:

All of those, and a few dozen more, are relevant questions but simply require operational decisions. They’re just the form, not the function.

The core of, and the hardest work in designing a brand loyalty campaign is understanding emotions, value, and enriching the space that exists in-between brand and client. Do the homework and the rest just works.

Being seen is harder than ever. The marketing channels we trusted to perform consistently (Google, Ads, Email, Inbound, Outreach and many social networks) are no longer reliable and the returns are diminishing faster than we can react. 

Happy clients come back. They endorse. They amplify. Investing in your existing clients is not just another tactic, but a key difference that can make you thrive. And yet, a strategy for loyalty is incomplete, or even completely missing, in most companies. 

It takes time, hard work and patience. It’s worth every second and every penny. Like love, and music. It’s time to show your clients you’re meant to be.

Thank you for reading.

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